Using Cultural Intelligence to Connect with Audiences Across the Spectrum

Digital advertising has been facing challenges since Marc Pritchard, CMO at P&G, called on the industry to clean up its act back in 2017. And with privacy and brand safety issues still coming to light, many advertisers are looking to new, innovative ways to tell their stories.

Viacom Velocity CMO Dario Spina said at Advertising Week New York that brands should start thinking about a cultural publishing strategy.

At a recent Advertising Week 2018 panel, Dario Spina, chief marketing officer of full-service integrated marketing and creative content group Viacom Velocity, went into detail on how he developed strategies for authentic, creative brand storytelling. “About a year and a half ago we created a culture and creative insights team to provide thought leadership and cultural intelligence to our advertising partners,” he shared at the panel.

Spina uses this knowledge of culture to lead the award-winning marketing team that develops and customizes insights-driven, branded entertainment and fan experiences for advertising partners.

“Now we see with the advent of the internet and social media that us regular folks actually have a hand in shaping culture,” he said. “And all those other constituencies I just talked about, along with fans, are getting closer together and acting like each other and shaping culture in several different ways, and that’s why we call the study The Culture of Proximity.” He added that what they really found was that more and more brands should start thinking about a cultural publishing strategy as opposed to just a commercial one.

Viacom’s branded entertainment lead also went on to discuss the breakdown of cultural segments: “We basically discovered that we could break down culture into four lanes; Mass Culture is what we talked about, Deep Culture is like shared niche interests, Crowd Culture is when we all step into a cultural conversation like what’s bubbling up on Twitter, and Close Culture, which is actually what most of humanity grew up with and that is basically what you share with your friends and family.”

Breaking down these segments then enables creative departments to build a cultural plan for clients, which allows advertisers to appeal to connect with audiences across the spectrum. This is the advertising formula for the future.